


Glain's Thursday

by blessedharlot



Series: Glain: A Week in the Life [4]
Category: The Great Library Series - Rachel Caine
Genre: Aro Ace Glain Wathen, Canon Asexual Character, Fluff, Gen, Glain Has Hobbies, No Romance, No Sex, Post-Series, day in the life, glassblowing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:01:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22425994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blessedharlot/pseuds/blessedharlot
Summary: Glain practices a brand new skill.
Series: Glain: A Week in the Life [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1608322
Comments: 6
Kudos: 6





	Glain's Thursday

Glain was improving at being terrible at something.

She dipped the metal pipe into the furnace very, very carefully, protective trousers and sleeves already clinging to her sweaty skin. The techniques being demanded of her were new and strange… but that only brought Glain’s attention pleasurably to the work her fine motor muscles were doing to gain new competencies. 

It was a rare experience for her these days to feel this ungainly while trying to accomplish a physical task. Glain’s muscles had no memories built for this yet, and she struggled to maneuver her tools and enforce her will on her work. But that was the point. Try something entirely new. Something unrelated to her career, or to the writing that came so easily. This was hard. It was weird. And Glain was determined to make this work. She’d watched instructors demonstrate the techniques. Then she’d done all this, badly, with supervision. Now came doing it badly on her own, over and over again, while her body learned how.

Glain dipped her pipe again into the molten glass inside the furnace. Even that simple aim took some mental effort -- she wasn’t used to aiming a metal stick at glowing pourable liquid heated to thousands of degrees. She now successfully had some of it dripping from the end of her blowpipe. She rolled it until she had a gather that probably wouldn’t spill on the floor, then she pulled it from the furnace.

Glain carried the blow pipe to one of the other tools she intended to master: a piece of polished steel called a marver. With a nearby stand taking the weight of the pipe, Glain could use both hands to roll the pipe, which spun the glass. The action would allow her gather of glass to roll across the steel surface that both smoothed and cooled it. When it got too cold again, Glain would carry it back for heat, or for more glass. 

One of the aspects of glassblowing that appealed to Glain was this art of keeping the glass within a very specific window of heat. Too hot, and it was liquid, unshapeable in this manner. Too cool and it went rigid. The way to have sculptable glass was to push and pull on its temperature as she worked. The furnace did the work of providing the extraordinary heat. Air, time, or a conductor like metal would all bleed away that heat. Sometimes Glain would seek out the cooling; sometimes it would be critical to her technique. Other times, it would work against her, and she’d have to work around that.

A glassblower had to do their work while balancing between two extremes.

Her chunk of glass - what was it called again? Dammit, she should recall such a basic term - had gotten uneven and off-center as she tried to roll it smoothly on the marver. It also still wasn’t large enough yet for the project she was tentatively aiming for. (Realistically, whatever she made would be unusable. She wouldn’t come close to hitting the target of functionality the first few times. That was a given… but she still needed a pattern to aim for.) She needed more glass for her planned carafe, so she took the pipe back for another gather.

She was already getting quicker at collecting the slurpy glass on the tip of her pipe, so this time she practiced swinging. She pulled the pipe out and dropped the glass-burdened end toward the floor (but not _to_ the floor), then gave the pole short pivots to let the glass sway back and forth in the air. It was difficult to gauge the effects on the glass from this angle, but when she placed it back on the marver, the piece was longer. Glain rolled it a bit more on the marver, then she got another gather of glass.

She should practice adding color too, eventually, but she didn’t want to tackle that yet. No need to waste unnecessary supplies on pieces that wouldn’t be of a decent quality.

This time, when she pulled her pipe from the furnace, she took it to the rails for shaping. Here at the rails, she sat down in between two thin horizontal bars, and let them take the weight of the pipe from landing in her lap. Instead of the steel of the marver to smooth the side of her glass, she could spin her pipe on the rails while she molded the glass with hand tools… either carved (and wet) wooden shapes, or a pad of wetted paper she held across her hand.

This time, she chose the paper. She double-checked its moisture level, and began spinning the pipe back and forth as she pressed paper to glass. Glain felt the glass change shape against the force of her hand, and watched as the contour visibly shifted and the paper threw up steam. She liked this part very much. It must be like molding clay, but more dangerous. This felt so deeply intimate to Glain, shaping glass in the palm of her hand, and she felt a kinship with generations of glassblowers who had done this before her.

Speaking of which, she also needed to practice the part where she actually blew into the glass.

She took the glass to the furnace to heat and soften it again, and then brought it back to the rails, leaning it on only one rail as she brought the far, cool end of the pipe up to her lips.

There was some weight of meaning to this part that Glain hadn’t quite sorted… some heft to using her own breath, of all things, to create something. Surely the act of using one’s lungs as a tool for manipulating molten glass had some tendril of danger to it. And the reality of that simple present-day caution had a dozen more phantoms of old danger behind it; the smell of glass and heat and the thoughts of tender human lung tissue skirted the edge of a memory or two. The presence of glass at her job so often meant that Glain was facing that single terrifying weapon that had taken so much from them. 

But layered on top of all of that was still some subtle charm, some gentle warmth. She might use her breath some day to make a vase for Khalila, or a wine glass for Wolfe. She might master those molds in the corner someday, and make Nic a piece of Venetian style crimped glass… shaped with her breath. There’s something about that fact that tickled at the base of her spine.

Glain took the tip of the pipe into her mouth - along with her own thumb beside it - and blew a puff of air into it. When she had breath trapped in the pipe with her thumb, she tilted the pipe away and watched the glass. Her expelled air reached the hot glass and began to expand, creating the bubble she wanted in the center of her thick wad of glass.

She blew again, watching the space inside the glass expand. How large would this piece be, once she got the walls to the thickness she desired? Should she risk another gather? She decided she probably didn’t have an overgrown city-sized ballistic sphere just yet, and took the would-be-carafe back to the furnace for more glass. 

Glain was so busy watching her growing piece in the liquifying heat of the furnace - observing the symmetry of the bubble as she spun it to keep it centered - that when she pulled out of the heat, she sent glass dribbling onto the floor. The blob sent a faint flame up as it incinerated the dust below it, and then its orange sheen quickly started fading to a useless clear slug.

Glain was annoyed with herself. But it was to be expected, trying to gain new competencies. She practiced comfort with the mistake as she took the pipe back to the rails to blow and shape what she had.

As she curled wet paper to glass again, Glain thought about mistakes, and pride, and comfort. She thought about her long, careful observations of every career High Garda she’d met. She watched each for habits of thought, for patterns of behavior. And what was on her mind today were the most nauseating offenders, in her eyes - those who had sided with the old Archivist for no reason other than habit. No zealotry, no hatred of Wolfe or the others. It was only a simple, tawdry rigidity of mind. Some had fought with the old regime, and some still hid spinelessly in the ranks and just grumbled now. Change was unfamiliar, frightening, and thus untrustworthy to them. 

Glain loathed them. She hated thinking that about coworkers, but it was the only honest description. She wondered what it would take for her to see a transition approach, and so thoroughly miss the rightness of it. The honor inherent in it.

She wouldn’t ever let that rigidity, that habit of comfort and familiarity happen to her. She’d remain teachable. She’d keep her mind flexible to new thought. She would let herself look a fool to learn something new. Every year of her life, she’d make sure she did it.

Some time later, Glain had blocked and rolled and swung and blown, and she now had at the end of her pipe a vaguely-carafe-sized glass contraption, with walls of a vaguely usable thickness. She’d even shaped a bottom to the carafe that positively thrilled her with how potentially usable it looked. It was time now to turn the piece and work on the opening - something that would take a whole different set of skills and tools to accomplish. It was also time to carefully reheat the piece, as it was relatively cold and quite hard by now.

Glain stood, distracted by the steps to come, and inadvertently tapped the pipe against one of the rails. It was a mild force… but that was exactly how one took a piece off their pipe.

With nothing in the way, Glain’s work detached entirely and fell to the floor, shattering with a crash. The sound was oddly pleasant and terrifying all at once. A ghost of a sickly sweet smell met the juvenile pleasure of a simple thing completely demolished. 

_Well. What good practice at making mistakes this was,_ Glain thought. _Look at my success!_

**Author's Note:**

> Tomorrow: Glain gets family time, with the *other* family!


End file.
